Neoliberal Processes Research Articles

'I just don't want to connect my life with this occupation': working-class young men, manual labour, and social mobility in contemporary Russia.

A key strand in the Western literature on working-class masculinities focuses on whether young men are capable of the feminized performances apparently required of them in new service economies. However, the wider literature on processes of neoliberalization - emphasizing the 'hollowing out' of labour markets, the cultural devaluation of lower-skilled forms of employment, and the pathologization of working-class lives - would suggest that it is as much a classed as a gendered transformation that is demanded of young men leaving school with few qualifications. This dimension of neoliberalization is highlighted by ethnographic data exploring the experiences and subjectivities of young workers in St Petersburg, Russia, where traditional forms of manual labour have not given way to 'feminized' work, but have become materially and symbolically impoverished, and are perceived as incapable of supporting the wider transition into adult independence. In this context, young workers attempt to emulate new forms of 'successful masculinity' connected with novel service sector professions and the emergent higher education system, despite the unlikelihood of overcoming a range of structural and cultural barriers. These acquiescent, individualized responses indicate that, while ways of being a man are apparently being liberated from old constraints amongst the more privileged, neoliberalization narrows the range of subject positions available to working-class young men.

Neoliberalization and mega-events: The transition of Rio de Janeiro’s hybrid urban order

ABSTRACTThe current developments in Rio de Janeiro in the wake of the 2014 International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympic Games have accelerated the transition from a hybrid urban order to a new urban order of intensified neoliberalization and commodification. This transition is a complex and contradictory process that entails both rollback and rollout features of neoliberalism, as well as a permanent restructuring of sociospatial relations and political arrangements. By discussing the ongoing policies and politics of urban restructuring, we examine the creative destruction of urban structures, institutional arrangements, and regulations of urban space with the transformation of 3 sites in Rio de Janeiro—Barra da Tijuca, the port district, and the South Zone. The process of variegated neoliberalization generates new modes of production and reproduction, which threaten the principles of democratic governance and universalization of rights to the city.

Why are housing cooperatives successful? Insights from Swiss affordable housing policy

Housing policy is primarily regulated at the municipal level, especially in view of the international trend towards the withdrawal of the national state in this sector. This article examines recent developments in Swiss housing policy in five large cities, and the counter-reactions that are emerging due to an acute housing shortage. Relying on critical literature on housing, we present the main instruments of the Swiss housing policy and empirically analyse the political debates about their implementation. Results show that housing cooperatives are the housing support mechanism that the whole political spectrum can agree on. As the vast majority of cooperatives are non-profit, we observe the puzzling situation where neoliberal processes of state withdrawal in social policies lead to the promotion of a form of housing that is mostly common property-based and decommodified. The reasons behind their success are complex, but basing policies on private initiative rather than public property and targeting the middle class contributes to their popularity.

Neoliberalization's Propagation of Health Inequity in Urban Rebuilding Processes: The Dependence on Context and Path.

This article will discuss how neoliberal processes during urban redevelopment sustain and increase health inequities through uneven wealth accumulation and development. It will use examples of urban development in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, to highlight how key neoliberal strategies of territorial development, economic development, and place promotion- mediated through the process of creative destruction-result in uneven development and wealth accumulation, which in turn result in health inequities. The history of rebuilding processes in Baltimore offers insight into the context and path-dependency of current neoliberalization rebuilding processes and current health inequities.

Locating the global financial crisis: variegated neoliberalization in four European cities

ABSTRACTLocating the global financial crisis: variegated neoliberalization in four European cities. Territory, Politics, Governance. This paper looks at the variegated impact of the 2008 global financial crisis and the different ways in which local strategic actors imagined and responded to it through a comparative study of Barcelona, Brussels, Leeds and Turin. Drawing on cultural political economy, we see crisis moments as fertile territory for the analysis of variegation in urban neoliberalization processes as they can break path dependencies and open up alternatives. Inspired by the comparative turn in critical urban studies, our case studies are not offered as representative samples but as dense sites to explore the various interpretations and uses of the crisis, particularly at the elite level. This analysis suggests considerable variegation in how the crisis was both felt and interpreted locally across the four cities. The local elites did not regard this as a crisis of or in their own urban growth models, but as something external. However, as the global financial crisis morphed into national sovereign debt crises and austerity programmes, the experience in each city has been relatively similar. The paper concludes by emphasizing the continuity function of specific local actors through the processes of meaning-making in which they engage, something that existing work on variegated neoliberalization has so far overlooked.

The feminization of environmental responsibility: a quantitative, cross-national analysis

ABSTRACTWomen tend to engage more frequently in pro-environmental behavior (PEB) relative to men – what has been termed the ‘feminization of environmental responsibility’. While past research has found that women participate in higher levels of PEB compared to men cross-nationally, the variation in this gender gap across national contexts has yet to be explained. The question driving this research is: what is the context in which environmental responsibility is most feminized? I address this question by conducting a quantitative cross-national analysis of gender differences in PEB using International Social Survey Programme 2010 data on 30 countries. As expected, women report greater involvement in PEB than men in the vast majority of countries analyzed. The gender gap is not only explained by women’s greater levels of reported environmental concern than men in these countries, but also by a country’s level of market liberalization and ratio of female to male labor force participation. This research contributes cross-national quantitative evidence to support arguments emerging from qualitative literature suggesting a relationship between political-economic context and the feminization of environmental responsibility. In general, this research illuminates the complex relationships between environmental solutions and social justice and suggests a connection between processes of neoliberalism, gender equity, and sustainability.

Unbuilding the City: Writing Demolition

Unbuilding the City: Writing Demolition

Repoliticising multi-stakeholder standards processes: the Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials’ standards and certification scheme

The Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB) is one of a number of sustainability standards schemes that have been approved by the European Union under its 2009 Renewable Energy Directive (EU RED). The RSB scheme is often referred to positively not only because the sustainability standard is considered to exemplify greater rigour than many of the other EU-approved standards in terms of their claims to protect ‘sustainability’, but also because it provides an example of a ‘multi-stakeholder’ model of standards development that is assumed to confer greater legitimacy on the sustainability standards that are produced. In recognising that standards processes are part of wider processes of neoliberalisation, this paper explores the process in which the RSB standard was produced. In doing so it considers how notions of sustainability embodied in the RSB standards were shaped not only by its ‘multi-stakeholder’ process, but also by wider influences that were brought to bear in that process, including the growing spectre of a ‘standards market’ produced by the EU’s approval of different schemes.

Building colleges for the future: pedagogical and ideological spaces

This article focuses on the Building Colleges for the Future (BCF) initiative (2008) which saw a wave of new-build Further Education (FE) colleges spring up across England in the final years of the New Labour government. It draws on qualitative data from a research study focusing on four new-build colleges in the West Midlands of England to theorise the BCF initiative. Using theory derived primarily from Lefebvre, the paper contextualises BCF within a frame of neoliberalisation and discusses the impact of the ‘production of space’ represented by the initiative with a research focus on two areas: pedagogy and ideology. The main findings are that these new-build colleges can be interpreted as spatial expressions of policy-makers and others’ perceptions of teaching and learning; in ideological terms, they also trumpet a ‘new lifestyle’ and a ‘new art of living’ for FE staff and students that is however, in tension with residual pedagogical practices and values. The article concludes that despite being an expression of neoliberal abstract space, these new-builds can still be seen as providing a frame for alternative individual and collective encounters with education which may subvert and outlast the processes of neoliberalisation that they appear to embody.

‘Omnus et Singulatim’: Establishing the Relationship Between Transitional Justice and Neoliberalism

First developed by human rights lawyers and activists, transitional justice emerged from the so-called third wave of democratisations in Latin America. Over the last 30 years, transitional justice has risen to become a ‘global project’ of global governance. Locating the emergence of transitional justice within the global rise of neoliberalism, this article shows that transitional justice serves an important function in regards to the particularly neoliberal contours of many transitions. Understanding this relation, the article argues, is best served with recourse to what Wendy Brown describes as neoliberalism’s practice of omnus et singulatim, a double process through which ‘communities’ are gathered together as stakeholders to take part in economic activities whilst simultaneously being individualised as ‘responsibilised’ and self-sufficient entrepreneurial units. Taking this concept, I argue that transitional justice also undertakes a process of omnus et singulatim that usefully prefigures and supports processes of neoliberalisation during ‘transition’. Transitional justice, it concludes, does the necessary work of bringing conflictual, traumatised, societies back together, whilst doing so on terms that do not threaten but instead prefigure the individualising demands made upon subjects at the sites of neoliberal transition.

Resisting neoliberalism: the challenge of activist librarianship in English Higher Education

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the political position of academic librarianship in the context of recent changes in English Higher Education. The neoliberalisation of academic librarianship, both as an academic discipline and profession, is considered. The emergence of the Radical Librarians Collective is examined as a potential site through which to counter these developments and foster radical alternatives.Design/methodology/approachThe paper draws upon Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony and praxis, and post-structural critiques of neoliberalism, as a theoretical framework to guide data collection and analysis, and observe developments within academic librarianship vis-à-vis broader processes of neoliberalisation. Empirical data collected through interviews and participant observation are analysed using thematic and critical discourse analysis.FindingsThe research finds that academic librarianship as a discipline and practice is undergoing a process of neoliberalisation. An umbrella organisation of activist librarians, Radical Librarians Collective, is found to be resisting these developments and has some potential to become a space through which radical alternatives to neoliberal hegemony can be explored and fostered.Research limitations/implicationsThe research demonstrates the utility of a Gramscian theoretical framework as a lens through which to observe developments in the field of library and information studies (LIS). Further empirical work would deepen the authors’ understanding of such developments across a range of institutions and locales.Originality/valueThe research makes an original contribution to critical research on the struggles around the neoliberalisation of academic librarianship in the UK. The theoretically informed analysis provides original insights into these processes, and makes a methodological contribution to LIS research.

Neoliberal Universities, Patriarchies, Masculinities, and Myself: Transnational-personal Reflections on and from the Global North

This article reflects on working in eight universities in Finland, Sweden, and the UK, along with many transnational research projects. These are analysed within the framework of what might be called neoliberal universities, neoliberal trans(national)patriarchies, and neoliberal masculinities. Importantly, these are reflections from the global North, being transnationally located there, rather than glossed as 'global' or simply assumed as nationally contextualised. This discussion is located within the burgeoning literature on neoliberalism, and then proceeds to examine, first, experiences in the UK, before those in Finland and Sweden. The final section focuses on the transnationalisation of these neoliberal processes in academia - for example, through transnational research development, projectisation of research, and language use, performance and performativity. In such ways multiple connections are drawn between the greater organisational 'autonomy' of universities, contradictions of transnationalisations of academia, and the construction of 'autonomous' individual(ist) academics.

Free market ideology and deregulation in Colorado’s oil fields: Evidence for triple movement activism?

ABSTRACTUnconventional oil and gas extraction (UOGE) has spurred an unprecedented boom in onshore production in the US. Despite a surge in related research, a void exists regarding inquiries into policy outcomes and perceptions. To address this, support for federal regulatory exemptions for UOGE is examined using survey data collected in 2015 from two Northern Colorado communities. Current regulatory exemptions for UOGE can be understood as components of broader societal processes of neoliberalization. Free market ideology increases public support for federal regulatory exemptions for UOGE. Perceived negative impacts do not necessarily drive people to support increased federal regulation. Utilizing neo-Polanyian theory, interaction between free market ideology and perceived negative impacts is explored. Free market ideology appears to moderate people’s views of regulation: increasing the effect of perceived negative impacts while simultaneously increasing support for deregulation. To conclude, the ways in which free market ideology might normalize the impacts of UOGE activity are discussed.

The International Monetary Fund and the Chilean Chicago Boys, 1973–7: Cold Ties between Warm Ideological Partners

This article unveils the hitherto overlooked tensions between Chile and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) during the formative years of the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (from September 1973 to late 1977). This article shows that ideological affinity between the IMF and Pinochet’s economic team of ‘Chicago Boys’ did not necessarily guarantee fruitful cooperation between the parties. The analysis of this intricate relationship sheds new light on the processes of economic neoliberalization that were conducted in Latin America, with different levels of IMF involvement, between the 1970s and the 1990s. By challenging axiomatic and simplistic approaches of IMF–Latin American relations, this article provides a unique prism to reconsider not only the IMF’s motivations and constraints, but also the proactive modus operandi of its borrowing member-states.

City as Lens

In recent years, a paradox has emerged in the study of youth. On the one hand, in the context of the processes of globalization, neoliberalism and precarity, the patterning of leisure and work for young people is becoming increasingly convergent across time and space. On the other hand, it is clear that young people’s habits and dispositions remain deeply tied to local places, with global processes filtered and refracted through specific cultural contexts. Against this backdrop, drawing on an Economic and Social Research Council/Research Grants Council (ESRC/RGC)-funded study of contemporary youth in Glasgow and Hong Kong, this article seeks to explore the role of the city as a mediating lens between global forces and local impacts. Utilizing both historical and contemporary data, the article argues that despite parallels in the impact of global forces on the structure of everyday life and work, young people’s leisure habits remain rooted in the fates and fortunes of their respective cities.

Social and Solidarity Economy in a Neoliberal Context: Transformative or Palliative? The Case of an Argentinean Worker Cooperatives

Neoliberalisation process was imposed worldwide and it made many grassroots responses emerge, which many can be conceptualised as part of the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE). Within this field, worker co-operatives appear as an option to mainly safeguard employment and earn a living. Several cases have been documented about worker co-operatives as a way to develop impoverished areas or vulnerable populations. However, co-operatives in many cases appear as a second best employment option during turmoil, rather than as an alternative to mainstream economy, which ultimately is the cause of poverty and vulnerability. This paper seeks to widen social economic literature and explores the tension inherent in the concept of SSE, namely whether it should be seen as an alternative to capitalism or a means of ameliorating its worst effects. Although this tension has been minimised in the literature, by introducing the case of an Argentine workers’ cooperative, this research illustrates how these two antagonistic discourses coexist within the organisation. (Less)

Representation through Privatisation: Regionalisation of Forest Governance in Tambacounda, Senegal

Government officials, development agents and scholars showcase Senegal's 1996 regionalization reforms as a step towards the deepening of decentralisation. Yet this article shows that the reforms narrowed down local democracy via neoliberal processes. The reforms defined the regional councils as development intermediaries, to serve as a space for the negotiation of public-private partnership contracts between local governments and business interests. Focusing on Tambacounda Region of Senegal, the article analyses the effects of the reforms on forest governance at regional and rural-community scales. First, using two project case studies, it illustrates the use of forest management plans and project-based environmental committees in enabling privatisation of rural community forest governance at the expense of democratic processes. Second, it examines how the intermediary role of the regional council compromised its ability to represent the substantive interests of base-level rural communities and helped instrumentalise the council to promote different privatisation alternatives offered by 'community-based' projects. This role was facilitated by a public-private development agency of the council. The discursive analysis of a regional council meeting illustrates that rather than offering a deliberative and participatory forum, council meetings were used to make representation claims about the 'local people' and to push a market-based neoliberal rationality.

Smart city e adattamento ai cambiamenti climatici: i casi Genova e Copenhagen a confronto

Smart cities are considered the only urban development’s pattern able to combine economic growth with the solution of some of the main problems provoked by urbanization, such as climate change. The paper analyzes both the evolution into smart cities and climate adaptation strategies in Genoa and Copenhagen, in which a process of urban neoliberalization is identified; the latter, passing through practices of policy transfer, engenders different assemblages.

Discursive Presence through Group Anonymity: Ethnonational Belonging, Gender, Sexuality, and Activism in the Republic of Armenia

The current post-Soviet Republic of Armenia (RA) government is deeply entrenched in the crippling consequences of neoliberal economic processes its predecessors and current members unleashed. The RA has no diplomatic relations with two of its neighbors, Turkey and Azerbaijan, and finds itself at an intersection of various geopolitical interests of powerful actors, such as the European Union and Russia. Public officials and media manipulate these circumstances to package ethnonational belonging in neotraditionalist terms, which always hinges on heteropatriarchy and ethnic absolutism, among other things. This article suggests that through its queering activism around normative ideologies, a women's group, called Queering Yerevan Collective, creates a vital feminist formation that challenges these dominant, if corrupt, narratives of belonging. The feminist formation of the Collective is informed by multiscale intellectual and artistic decolonization of gendered individual and collective Soviet and post-Soviet experiences and knowledge, as well as the social and civic spaces and transnational feminist theoretical approaches they engage. This project of queering is a radicalizing effort, bringing a microlevel social change that the Collective makes possible by engendering new knowledge and activist tools through these decolonized (re)conceptualizations of past and present sociopolitical realities.

Persistent Neoliberalisation in PES: Taxes, Tariffs, and the World Bank in Costa Rica

Recent critiques of 'payments for ecosystem services' (PES) and other market-based instruments for environmental conservation have noted that such mechanisms rarely (if ever) operate according to idealised market rules. The characterisation of PES as a form of 'neoliberal conservation', therefore, has been questioned and even deemed to be misguided. While close examination of local context and micropolitics often reveals a nuanced view of contested and hybrid implementation, similar analysis can also reveal the way that officials continue to steer programs towards market ideals. In this paper, I consider the case of Costa Rica's national Pagos por Servicios Ambientales (PSA) program, to suggest that–in spite of its imperfect correspondence to an idealised neoliberal model–it is undergoing a continual process of neoliberalisation. I explore, in particular, the evolution of PSA financing, which has shifted (under the influence of two World Bank projects) towards direct financialised transactions between 'users' and 'providers' of ecosystem services. The paper provides a historical account of the complex (and sometimes contradictory) processes that have produced the program's current hybrid neoliberal form. It explores World Bank / Costa Rica relations and market-oriented interventions to the financing of ecosystem service payments, and it explains that (despite inherent contradictions inhibiting market formation) neoliberal actors within the state can still implement mechanisms designed to approximate markets.